Skymind: Silicon Valley's bet on artificial intelligence

Company name: SkymindHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $3.32 million in three rounds

Skymind is an early-stage company, but it's quickly establishing itself as one of Silicon Valley's premier sources of expertise on artificial intelligence in the enterprise.

For instance, Skymind cofounder Adam Gibson and top engineer Josh Patterson were tapped by famed tech publisher O'Reilly to write its guide to "deep learning," a core technology in building AI.

Skymind sells software and services based on Deeplearning4j, a popular tool that enterprise programmers are using to build systems to detect fraud and recognize images for business.

In September, Skymind raised $3 million from Y Combinator and the Chinese internet giant Tencent.

Pivotal: Helping big companies act like little companies

Pivotal CEO Rob MeeGlassdoor/Pivotal

Company name: PivotalHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $1.7 billion in three rounds

Pivotal is a startup spun off from the IT heavyweight EMC that now stands on its own.

While it sells the Pivotal Cloud Foundry application development platform, this startup's main product is education: It teaches making more software faster, so teams at big companies can deliver code at the same breakneck pace as those like Google or Facebook.

CoreOS: Google's big bet on improving cloud computing

Company name: CoreOSHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$50 million in five rounds

CoreOS is one of the major players in the small but growing market for so-called software containers, a technology that help developers build applications at huge scales.

CoreOS was well known for its public feud with the billion-dollar startup Docker. But both companies have seemingly put the feud behind them, as CoreOS focuses on integrating with software called Kubernetes, a technology for managing containers that spun off from Google.

In fact, Google is one of CoreOS's biggest boosters: GV, the venture capital firm formerly known as Google Ventures, made a $30 million investment in CoreOS in 2016 following its $12 million round in 2015.

Nginx: Secretly running the internet

Nginx CEO Gus RobertsonScreenshot/YouTube

Company name: Nginx Headquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $41 million in four rounds

Nginx's flagship web server technology is immensely popular, with 150 million websites using it. In fact, 52.2% of the top 1,000 busiest websites in the world use Nginx to handle the heavy lifting of delivering web pages to a browser, as measured by the tracking authority W3Techs.

We use it internally at Business Insider, too: If you're reading this article, you're using Nginx.

While Nginx has flown under the radar for the past several years, it raised an $8 million round of funding this year to accelerate its growth.

Canva: The Microsoft Office challenger from down under

Canva CEO Melanie PerkinsCanva

Company name: CanvaHeadquarters: Sydney, AustraliaFunding to date: $45.6 million in six rounds

Microsoft Office is the de facto standard in the workplace, no doubt about it.

But from Canva's perspective, there's one area where Office is woefully inadequate: graphic design. Canva is trying to pick up PowerPoint's slack with a set of super-useful tools to help anybody in the office — or outside of it — feel like a graphic designer.

Canva recently raised a $15 million round of funding to fulfill CEO Melanie Perkins' vision of making it a serious business-software player.

Mesosphere: Bringing an operating system to data centers

Mesosphere founder Benjamin HindmanYouTube

Company name: MesosphereHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$122.25 million in four rounds

Mesosphere offers what it calls a data center operating system. It's a commercial version of an increasingly popular free and open-source project called Mesos that's used by developers.

Mesosphere cofounder Ben Hindman created Mesos while at the University of California at Berkley. Hindman and the other Mesosphere founders brought Mesos to Twitter. Then cofounder Florian Leibert, who previously worked at Twitter, brought it to Airbnb.

Datadog: Helping developers keep an eye on their apps

Datadog CEO Olivier PomelDatadog

Company name: DatadogHeadquarters: New YorkFunding to date: $147.9 million in six rounds

Datadog competes with the publicly traded New Relic in the field of application monitoring — the fast-growing market for tools that help developers make sure their software, services, and servers are operating at peak efficiency.

This startup can count teams at companies such as Salesforce, EA, and Amtrak as customers. Meanwhile, Datadog has built considerable buzz for its developer-friendly interface and features.

An enterprise software startup based in New York City, Datadog kicked off 2016 with a $94.5 million funding round led by Iconiq Capital.

HackerRank: Fixing the job interview process for programmers

HackerRank cofounder and CEO Vivek RavisankarHackerRank

Company name: HackerRankHeadquarters: Palo Alto, CaliforniaFunding to date:$28 million in five rounds

Ask any Silicon Valley programmer, and they'll tell you how terrible the job interview process can be. It's hard to distill a lifetime's worth of computer science knowledge into a 30-minute interview.

That's where HackerRank steps in. Founded and led by former Amazon engineer Vivek Ravisankar, HackerRank tries to provide an objective set of tests for a company to quickly and accurately identify the applicants with the skills it needs. Cisco, VMware, and Uber are all HackerRank customers.

In September, HackerRank closed a $4.3 million round of funding.

CodeFights: Like Fight Club for programmers

CodeFights CEO Tigran SloyanCodefights

Company name: CodeFightsHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$12.5 million in two rounds

The idea behind CodeFights is that competitiveness breeds creativity, so it turns the act of learning to code into a series of fun, easy-to-learn games. And as you improve, CodeFights will help you find job opportunities to put your new skills to work.

The company raised $10 million in November in early funding to keep developing its concept of competitive programming.

Backblaze: A new challenger to Amazon

Backblaze CEO and cofounder Gleb BudmanBackblaze/YouTube

Company name: BackblazeHeadquarters: San Mateo, CaliforniaFunding to date:$5.3 million in two rounds

Backblaze isn't like most of the startups on this list.

Starting in 2007 as a hard drive backup service for consumers, Backblaze achieved profitability relatively early on in its existence and has quietly grown without taking in much outside funding.

In 2016, Backblaze officially got into the enterprise services market with the launch of B2, a new cloud storage service for developers that undercuts the Amazon Web Services S3 giant in price while providing similar benefits.

LitBit: Reinventing the data center

LitBit founder and CEO Scott NoteboomLitBit

Company name: LitBitHeadquarters: San Jose, CaliforniaFunding to date:$9.5 million in two rounds

Founded in 2013 by former Yahoo and Apple data center chief Scott Noteboom, LitBit's mission is to reinvent the data center with automation.

In the same way that consumers are turning to platforms like Nest or Apple HomeKit to automate their homes, LitBit's flagship RhythmOS is designed to be a single place for the IT department to manage its data centers and server farms.

The promise is to let companies of all sizes take advantage of the benefits that Apple has seen as they scale their server infrastructure.

Neo Technology: Reinventing the database

Company name: Neo TechnologyHeadquarters: San Mateo, CaliforniaFunding to date:$80.1 million in five rounds

Neo Technology is trying to bring about a revolution in database technology.

While most companies rely on the common relational database — where things are put into neat little cells, Microsoft Excel-style — what Neo sells are graph databases. This connects data in terms of relationships, in the same way Facebook's social graph does for people.

Companies such as Walmart, eBay, and NASA have turned to Neo's graph databases to do high-data operations much faster and for much cheaper than a traditional database.

In late 2016, Neo raised a $36 million round of venture capital funding to keep developing the technology.

Slack: The fastest-growing enterprise app

Slack CEO Stewart ButterfieldSlack

Company name: SlackHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$539.95 million in nine rounds

Its work-chat app isn't just for messaging coworkers anymore — it can do a lot of things, such as automatically pulling Twitter notifications into a channel, calling a Lyft, or looking up restaurants nearby.

HashiCorp: Turning programmers into digital nomads

HashiCorp founder Mitchell HashimotoHashiCorp

Company name: HashiCorpHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $34.18 million in two rounds

While he was still in college, Mitchell Hashimoto invented an open-source tool, called Vagrant, that would make him famous in the coding world by age 23. Vagrant became the foundation of his startup, HashiCorp.

Vagrant is a tool that helps you easily set up a programming environment using whatever platform you want (VMware, Docker, etc.) and then move it from computer to computer. Download and install it on your Mac or Windows or Linux PC, and within minutes you're ready to code.

In September, HashiCorp raised an additional $24 million, as investors showed their support for Hashimoto's vision.

Lever: Solving the talent crunch

Lever CEO Sarah NahmGlassdoor/Lever

Company name: LeverHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$32.8 million in four rounds

Lever was founded by Sarah Nahm, a protégé of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer while she was at Google. In fact, Mayer, along with famed Silicon Valley VC Keith Rabois, participated in Lever's Series A round in 2014.

The goal of Lever is to help companies find and retain talent by providing tools to more efficiently sift through résumés and portfolios to find the skills they need. It also provides tools for helping track employee movement as they grow with the company, helping customers such as Lyft and Quora hire more people faster.

Lever kicked off 2016 with a $20 million round of funding in January.

Wavefront: Making things simpler for software developers

Wavefront CEO Pete CittadiniWavefront

Company name: WavefrontHeadquarters: Palo Alto, CaliforniaFunding to date:$65.5 million in three rounds

Wavefront's cofounders Dev Nag and Clement Pang were a part of the team that developed Borg, Google's famous in-house software for managing its hugely complex server infrastructure, even as it kept growing to meet the search giant's massive demand.

Later, in roles at Facebook and Twitter, the Wavefront founders realized how much more common that problem is becoming, as more companies are managing servers, clouds, and everything in between.

The flagship Wavefront product takes a similar approach as Borg, sucking up all the data it can from outside systems and putting it all in one place, so an IT department always knows what's happening and can alert engineers if something goes wrong.

Turbonomic: Turning an established market on its head

Company name: TurbonomicHeadquarters: Boston, MassachusettsFunding to date:$60 million in three rounds

Turbonomic turns the $5 billion network management market on its head. It uses a "supply and demand" model to match an app with the exact amount of computing and storage capacity it needs, changing that capacity as the app's needs grow or shrink, with no human intervention needed.

Board member and VC investor Ben Nye took over as CEO in 2013. (Nye is still a VC with Bain Capital Ventures.)

It has also attracted the tech bigwig Bill Veghte to join the company full time as executive chairman. Veghte is known for his executive positions at Microsoft and HP and a short-lived stint as CEO of SurveyMonkey.

SnapRoute: Apple's secret sauce for reliable networks

SnapRoute founder and CEO Jason ForresterSnapRoute

Company name: SnapRouteHeadquarters: Palo Alto, CaliforniaFunding to date: $4.5 million in a seed round

SnapRoute was founded in 2015 by Apple's former networking team, and is led by CEO Jason Forrester. At Apple, the team was responsible for building a network so reliable it would never go down.

The story goes that the whole team quit Apple the same week Apple refused to let it collaborate with other network engineers outside the company through an organization founded by Facebook known as the Open Compute Project.

The team fired up its own startup to sell network software based on the concepts it implemented at Apple — and its company has been gangbusters ever since.

In fact, SnapRoute has grown so popular in the world of open-source network software that in late October, it swooped in and took over technical leadership on a project called OpenSwitch that was created and spearheaded by the IT giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

ThousandEyes: Watching the internet for signs of trouble

ThousandEyes CEO Mohit LadThousandEyes

Company name: ThousandEyesHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$60.5 million in three rounds

Founded in 2010 by CEO Mohit Lad and CTO Ricardo Oliveira from their grad school work at UCLA, ThousandEyes helps ensure that when bits of the internet go down, companies can avoid being taken down, too — even if the problem is on the internet and out of their control.

The company currently employs over 130 people and is doubling revenue annually, with good enough cash flow that it never needed to raise venture funding to survive, Lad recently told Business Insider.

In fact, instead of seed money from VCs, it used a grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant didn't require Lad and Oliveira to sell equity in their company, but did mean they had to build a profitable product from the outset.

Today, its customers include companies such as Twitter, Zendesk, DigitalOcean, Verisign, and eHarmony.

MapR: Successfully selling big data software the old-fashioned way

MapR founder John SchroederMapR

Company name: MapR TechnologiesHeadquarters: San Jose, CaliforniaFunding to date:$194 million in five rounds

MapR is a big-data software company founded by John Schroeder, who has sold several startups, and former Googler M.C. Srivas, who left the company earlier this year to work at Uber.

MapR's product helps companies store massive volumes of data, analyze it, and run apps against it. It offers a commercial version of popular big data software called Hadoop. But a rarity among startups these days, it makes 90% of its revenue selling software with very high margins instead of selling a cloud service.

The company employs over 450 people, and its customers include American Express, Cisco, comScore, Experian, National Institutes of Health, Novartis, Samsung, TransUnion, and UnitedHealthcare.

HackerOne: Harnessing hackers for good, not evil

HackerOne CEO Marten MickosHackerOne

Company name: HackerOneHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$34 million in two rounds

HackerOne sets up "bug bounty" programs, in which companies ask screened and qualified hackers to attack them and then pay them based on the holes they found. The scarier the hole, the bigger the fee. (HackerOne takes a 20% cut.)

It was founded by two 20-something childhood friends and hackers extraordinaire Jobert Abma and Michiel Prins, along with Merijn Terheggen — formerly the CEO, now a board member — and Alex Rice, the former head of product security at Facebook.

In 2015, it hired Marten Mickos, who is famous for selling the open-source database startup mySQL to Sun Microsystems — now owned by Oracle — in 2008 for $1 billion. He also sold a startup called Eucalyptus to HP in 2014.

Revel Systems: Turning iPads into cash registers

Revel Systems CEO Lisa FalzoneRevel Systems

Company name: Revel SystemsHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$127.3 million in five rounds

Revel helped create a new industry: the iPad point-of-sale market. CEO Lisa Falzone and CTO Chris Ciabarra launched their startup in 2010 and built it into a company with a valuation of about $500 million that employs about 750 people.

The company doesn't disclose its revenue, but says it is profitable.

Falzone told Business Insider that she launched the company with no money and "sheer willpower." At one point, she even hunted down a guy she had met at a coffee shop and convinced him to invest $28,000 in her company on the spot. (She later paid him back.)

Freshdesk: Affordable customer service for all

Company name: FreshdeskHeadquarters: San Bruno, CaliforniaFunding to date:$149 million in six rounds

Freshdesk launched in 2011 as a cloud customer support app and has grown wildly since then.

The idea for Freshdesk came when CEO Girish Mathrubootham and CTO Shan Krishnasamy, who both worked at Zoho, saw a post on HackerNews complaining about the high cost of customer service cloud software. So they built a more affordable app for small businesses and won the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge, a contest for up-and-coming startups.

Since then, the company has blossomed into a service that claims 80,000 customers and 800 employees. And it has moved beyond small companies to bigger ones, too, naming Cisco, Honda, and 3M among its customers.

Qualtrics: An IPO-bound market research company

Qualtrics CEO Ryan SmithRyan Smith

Company name: QualtricsHeadquarters: Provo, UtahFunding to date:$220 million in two rounds

Qualtrics offers software for doing sophisticated surveys, market research, and analysis. It sprang into the Valley spotlight in 2012, when the tech world discovered that this family startup had bootstrapped its way to big growth and profitability.

At one point, its young 30-something CEO, Ryan Smith, had an acquisition offer of $500 million in one hand and seven term sheets from major VC firms in the other. He turned down the offer and decided to grow the company himself.

Smith founded the startup with his brother, Jared, an early Google employee. With Jared as COO, the company grew to over 1,200 employees and 8,000 customers, including Boeing, Microsoft, Spotify, and Under Armour. Investors valued it at over $1 billion.

Jared has stepped away for the moment, and Qualtrics has hired Microsoft exec Zig Serafin as COO as it gets ready for an initial public offering.

Gusto: Warm and fuzzy HR software for small businesses

Gusto

Company name: Gusto Headquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$157 million in four rounds

Gusto offers cloud payroll, insurance, and HR software for small businesses. It was c0-founded by Josh Reeves, who says the company now supports 40,000 customers.

Reeves, thoughtful and soft-spoken, prides himself on creating a warm and fuzzy corporate culture. Employees remove their shoes when they enter the office, eat a free catered lunch together daily, get a round-trip ticket anywhere in the world on their first and fifth anniversaries, and get all kinds of other benefits, including health insurance that covers fertility treatments for single women and same-sex couples.

In addition to VCs like GV, Reeves also has about 75 angel investors, many of them big names among the Valley tech elites.

ScienceLogic: Watching the cloud to $100 million-plus in revenue

ScienceLogic CEO Dave LinkDave Link

Company name: ScienceLogic Headquarters: Reston, VirginiaFunding to date:$84 million in four rounds

ScienceLogic helps companies locate and monitor all of their IT assets in the company's own data center or in the cloud.

The rise of cloud computing has been very, very good for this company.

ScienceLogic's revenue under contract — its bookings — increased from about $30 million in 2014 to $100 million in 2015, CEO Dave Link told Business Insider earlier this year. He expects big growth for 2016, too, although he wouldn't share the target number.

Before founding ScienceLogic, Link was working for a web-hosting company that died in the dot-com bubble. He and his two ScienceLogic cofounders bootstrapped the company for its first seven years, and then took VC funds in 2010.

"We didn't build this company to build it and flip it," Link told Business Insider. "We wanted to solve a problem near and dear to our hearts."

Cylance: Artificial intelligence to outsmart hackers

Company name: Cylance Headquarters: Irvine, CaliforniaFunding to date:$177 million in four rounds

Cylance built a product that uses artificial intelligence to analyze a file you're about to open, determine if it's malware, and then stop it from executing — all in less than a second.

It solves the problem of email phishing scams, which are still a favorite method of hackers, and has over 1,000 customers, it says.

Cylance was founded by Stuart McClure and Ryan Permeh, two well-known names in security who are perhaps best known for their work at McAfee.

Over the summer, when VC funding was tighter, Cylance raised a $100 million round and hit a $1 billion valuation. It was even backed by the CIA's venture fund, In-Q-Tel.

Invincea: A superfast way to stop ransomware

Invincea founder and CEO Anup GhoshInvincea

Company name: Invincea Headquarters: Fairfax, VirginiaFunding to date:$47.4 million in four rounds

Invincea offers a next-generation antivirus product that can stop, among other things, ransomware, a hack attack that locks up a computer and demands a ransom.

Its claim to fame is speed. It can identify and stop malware in less than 20 milliseconds, so it doesn't slow a computer down as it works to protect it.

Invincea was founded by CEO Anup Ghosh out of his work at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The company names MGM and Dell as two of its customers. Dell is also one of its investors.

Jamf: Helping IT pros manage Apple

JAMF cofounder Chip PearsonJamf Software cofounder Chip Pearson

Company name: JamfHeadquarters: Minneapolis, MinnesotaFunding to date:$30 million in one round

What started out as a bootstrapped company founded by two IT guys who loved Macs has become a full-fledged phenom. Jamf makes software that lets companies manage hundreds or thousands of Macs and iOS devices.

As Apple products such as the iPhone and iPad have gained popularity among office workers, bringing more Macs with them, Jamf s fortunes have risen from $38 million in revenue in 2013 to $67 million in 2015, according to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

The company boasts more than 9,000 customers — including one of the world's biggest Mac users, IBM — and has over 38,000 members in its Jamf Nation, an online community for Apple IT professionals.

Particle: Serving 70,000 IoT engineers — and growing

Particle cofounder and CEO Zach SupallaParticle

Company name: ParticleHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$14.63 million in five rounds

Before the internet of things can become the $6 trillion industry it's predicted to become, engineers need a way to create and test their IoT inventions.

That's what Particle does. It allows them to quickly build and prototype IoT devices and then run the device on the company's cloud over a cellular network. It can handle everything from a maker type building a home device to a company hoping to sell many thousands of an internet-enabled gadget.

The company started as a Kickstarter project in 2013 and is now used by 70,000 engineers in more than 170 countries, including a number of Fortune 500 companies, it says.

Cloudflare: Making the internet safer and faster

Cloudflare cofounder Michelle ZatlynGetty Images/Steve Jennings

Company name: CloudflareHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$182.05 million in four rounds

Cloudflare is one of the startups that secretly runs the internet by handling as much of 10% of all web traffic, speeding up those websites, and protecting them from hackers.

And 2016 was a banner year for the company. It was assigned to protect Donald Trump's websites from the hacker group Anonymous, which at one point threatened "total war." (Trump's website is still up, by the way.)

It also took steps to make the whole internet more secure by supporting a technical standard known as TLS 1.3, bolstering a "turbocharged encrypted internet."

That's because anyone can program these chips, meaning that making changes to the guts of a corporate network is like writing a new iPhone app.

Barefoot Networks is Nick McKeown's latest startup.

McKeown, a Stanford professor, helped launch a revolution in the computer hardware industry known as "software-defined networking" when he founded a startup called Nicira with Martin Casado, another industry icon.

VMware bought Nicira for $1 billion in 2012, setting off a war with Cisco, launching a frenzy of other computer network startups, and causing other areas of the hardware industry to emulate this software-based idea.

Instart Logic: Making apps run faster

Instart Logic CEO Manav Ratan MitalLinkedIn/Manav Ratan Mital

Company name: Instart LogicHeadquarters: Palo Alto, CaliforniaFunding to date:$140 million in five rounds

Instart Logic offers a way for web and mobile app developers to improve the performance of their apps by understanding the devices running them. Its claim to fame is that it doesn't require people to download any specialized software — it runs in the browser.

The company also offers a bunch of ways to secure apps, such Bot Defense, which aims to stop malicious bots trolling the internet looking for apps to infect.

The cofounders came from Aster Data, an early big-data company acquired by Teradata for $263 million in 2011.

The startup names companies such as Office Depot, IFTT, and Trip.com among its customers.

Stripe: The most valuable fintech startup

Stripe cofounders Patrick and John CollisonStripe

Company name: StripeHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date:$440 million in eight rounds

Founded in 2010, Stripe is now the highest-valued tech startup in the financial technology market, reaching $9.2 billion in its latest round of funding last month.

What makes Stripe so popular? Simplicity. In six years, Stripe has built a loyal developer community because of its easy-to-use interface and simple process to integrate payment systems into user apps such as Apple Pay.

Stripe's rise is also making its sibling cofounders, Patrick and John Collison, the new poster boys of the broader fintech industry, a market that's trying to radically alter how banking and financial services are provided.

Infer: Making sales more predictable

Infer CEO Vik SinghInfer

Company name: InferHeadquarters: Mountain View, CaliforniaFunding to date:$35 million in two rounds

Infer helps salespeople find better leads that are most likely to be converted into sales. Its predictive analytics software can collect and analyze a bunch of different data points before guiding the salesperson to the best sales route.

Its leadership team is deeply rooted in data science — all three of its cofounders are computer science majors. CEO Vik Singh cut his teeth at Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo before launching Infer in 2010.

Its customers include Zendesk, Atlassian, and AdRoll.

Boomerang Commerce: Bringing data to retailers

Company name: Boomerang CommerceHeadquarters: Mountain View, CaliforniaFunding to date:$20.5 million in two rounds

Boomerang Commerce offers solutions that help retailers optimize their pricing and selection. It sorts through retail data from a number of angles to show the best way to price, place and promote their products.

Its data-obsessive culture comes from its CEO, Guru Hariharan, who spent over five years at Amazon before launching Boomerang Commerce.

The company's deep-rooted data in retail also helped the 4-year-old startup become an oft-cited source for industry trends, frequently getting mentioned around big sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

SendGrid: Emailing its way to an IPO

SendGrid CEO Sameer DholakiaSendGrid

Company name: SendGridHeadquarters: Denver, ColoradoFunding to date: $80.36 million in six rounds

If any startup can prove email is not dead, it's SendGrid.

This 7-year-old startup, which makes email marketing and tracking tools, is profitable, expects to generate $100 million in revenue next year, and has signed up over 42,000 paying customers, including some of the largest tech companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Spotify.

Its CEO, Sameer Dholakia, calls SendGrid the "Twilio for email" because of its simple API structure that makes it easy for any company to gain access to its email management platform.

The Twilio analogy doesn't stop there — the company claims to be worth of an IPO and could go public in 2017, according to VentureBeat.

That's because MailChimp got here without following the traditional startup playbook. It hasn't raised any venture funding, didn't move out to California, and has always been profitable.

Now the 15-year-old marketing software company is on track to hit $400 million in revenue this year, building a solid business with 14 million customers and 550 employees. And with its laser focus on small-business customers, it looks as though MailChimp is here to stay for the long run.

App Annie: Helping app-makers grow their businesses

YouTube

Company name: App AnnieHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $157 million in six rounds

App Annie is a data analytics and market intelligence company that helps app-makers get a more in-depth view of their products and broader industries.

And the seemingly endless growth of the app market has fueled the 6-year-old startup.

App Annie now has more than 500,000 registered members and 450 employees spread across 15 offices worldwide. For most app makers, App Annie has become the go-to source for tracking app usage and data around specific verticals.

Investors are taking note, too — App Annie has raised a new round every year from some of the largest VC firms, including Greycroft, Sequoia, and IVP.

InsideSales: Finding the best way to sell

InsideSales CEO Dave ElkingtonInsidesales.com

Company name: InsideSalesHeadquarters: Provo, UtahFunding to date: $201.2 million in four rounds

InsideSales was one of the pioneers in AI sales software — way before it became a buzzword.

Its software basically helps salespeople make smarter decisions about their sales calls and email pitches. For example, it uses machine learning and data analytics to identify your best leads and recommend the most ideal time and method to reach them.

The company has been on a hot streak over the past two years, adding a bunch of former Salesforce executives. Just last week, it hired away Zendesk's CFO, who oversaw the company's IPO in 2014 — a sign that InsideSales could be nearing an IPO as well.

Apttus: Simplifying the sales process

Apttus CEO Kirk Krappe, centerScreenshot/YouTube

Company name: ApttusHeadquarters: San Mateo, CaliforniaFunding to date: $274 million in four rounds

Apttus continues to strive in the growing quote-to-cash software market, where salespeople use it to speed up the entire sales process. It helps automatically put together the right product offerings and financial terms of the contract while also taking care of the paperwork.

In fact, Apttus started to raise money in 2013, seven years after its founding, just as the quote-to-cash market started to gain steam. One of its competitors, SteelBrick, was acquired by Salesforce for $360 million in 2015.

CEO Kirk Krappe told MarketWatch in June that the company had $150 million in revenue this year and is shooting for an IPO next year.

Asana: An easy way to track everyone's work

Asana cofounders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin RosensteinAsana

Company name: AsanaHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $88.2 million in five rounds

Asana — perhaps best known for its two star cofounders, Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook cofounder, and Justin Rosenstein, an early Facebook employee — is back on the rise after revamping its product and logo last year.

The new look has also helped the company raise a fresh $50 million round from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, his wife; Y Combinator President Sam Altman; and Peter Thiel's VC firm Founder's Fund, among others.

Even Moskovitz and Rosenstein invested in the latest round, showing their commitment to the company's growth.

Gainsight: Getting the most out of your customers

Gainsight CEO Nick MehtaGainsight

Company name: GainsightHeadquarters: Redwood City, CaliforniaFunding to date: $104.25 million in six rounds

Gainsight's software has a simple goal: increase customer loyalty.

That means it tracks all kinds of data to make sure your customers don't leave your product, while helping them buy more from you.

Gainsight's laser focus in this area has helped the 5-year-old startup quickly become one of the leaders in what's broadly called "customer success management."

Its annual conference, Pulse, has also become the go-to event in the CSM industry.

Rubrik: Helping companies back up and recover data easily

Rubrik CEO Bipul SinhaYouTube/Nutanix

Company name: RubrikHeadquarters: Palo Alto, CaliforniaFunding to date: $112 million in three rounds

Rubrik has been one of the hottest startups in the enterprise world, raising all $112 million of its funding in the past 21 months.

Its technology basically lets companies easily back up, archive, and recover their data, whether in the cloud or in their own data centers.

And it's clearly drawing a lot of attention. According to CEO Bipul Sinha, Rubrik is doubling its revenue every quarter while getting at least $10 million in quarterly bookings. He says it takes 76 days on average to close $250,000 in deals, a relatively big and fast sales cycle. The company went from zero to 160 employees over the past two years.

Sinha has a pretty good track record of betting on successful enterprise startups — he's been a VC since 2008, having invested in unicorn startups such as Nutanix and Hootsuite early on.

BlueVine: Giving small businesses access to cash

BlueVine CEO Eyal LifshitzBluevine

Company name: BlueVineHeadquarters: Palo Alto, CaliforniaFunding to date: $64 million in seven rounds

BlueVine is a fintech startup that helps small businesses quickly turn their outstanding invoices into cash without having to wait for a typical 15- or 90-day pay cycle to come up.

The concept, called invoice factoring, isn't new. But BlueVine takes the process online, reducing the cost and speed to process factoring and opening up the service to small-business owners, who typically have difficulty getting the same type of deal from big banks.

CEO Eyal Lifshitz has a VC background and launched BlueVine in 2013. But over the past three years, BlueVine has doubled in size almost every quarter, quickly catching up to earlier starters like Fundbox and Tradeshift.

Envoy: Killing the lobby sign-in book

Envoy

Company name: EnvoyHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $20.31 million in three rounds

Envoy's mission is to digitize the visitor sign-in process.

Its app, most commonly used on an iPad, takes care of the entire guest registration process — sign-in, nondisclosure agreement signing, and photo badge printing — essentially killing the old paper-based system. It also has security and push-notification services that can be added on.

The 3-year-old startup has quickly become ubiquitous in Silicon Valley tech office spaces. Without much marketing, Envoy has signed up thousands of companies, including Airbnb, Box, and Lyft. Its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.

In fact, Envoy's so popular, it even made a cameo on the HBO show "Silicon Valley."

Front: Fixing group email inboxes

Front

Company name: FrontHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $13.25 million in four rounds

Front is smaller than many of the startups on this list. But it's certainly showing a lot of promise.

This 23-person startup is trying to reimagine team inboxes that manage email aliases like "support@" or "sales@," as well as Twitter and Facebook messages. Its goal is to become the one-stop shop for all external communications for companies.

After being in Y Combinator's 2014 batch, Front launched in May 2016 and is now backed by Social Capital. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield also joined the Series A round this year.

BetterWorks: Making it easy to set and manage goals

BetterWorks CEO Kris DugganBetterWorks

Company name: BetterWorksHeadquarters: Redwood City, CaliforniaFunding to date: $35 million in four rounds

BetterWorks helps companies easily set and manage goals for their employees.

The software is based on Google's famous employee review system, "objective key results," or OKR. BetterWorks' Google connection is no surprise — Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr, the person who brought OKR to Google, sits on the board, as well as Google's former HR boss, Laszlo Bock.

BetterWorks raised a $20 million round in May 2016 after coming out of stealth mode in 2014.

Everwise: Providing mentorship and career development resources

Everwise

Company name: EverwiseHeadquarters: New YorkFunding to date: $26.35 million in four rounds

Everwise is trying to change the way companies provide mentorship and career development training to its employees.

Its software offers personalized content and matches people with mentors from outside the company. The mentorship is voluntary, and the content is curated based on the user's LinkedIn profile and assessment test. It also makes it easy to set individual goals and track progress throughout the year.

CEO Mike Bergelson says the mentorship program is a two-way learning experience. The mentees learn from the more experienced mentors, but the mentors also get a chance to train someone and improve their leadership skills.

The company, based in Amsterdam and San Francisco, jumped into the scene in 2014, when it raised $250 million after raising only $16 million in the previous eight years. It had another undisclosed amount of funding in 2015, which was reported to be in "double-digit millions" and valued the company at $2.3 billion, according to TechCrunch.

Much like its main competitor, Stripe, Adyen continues to expand its footprint as more and more companies seek ways to quickly add payment functions to their online services. It already has some of the biggest names in the world using its technology, including Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber.